The Blog of Sue Brooks, Hervey Bay – Fraser Coast

So Council will spend our money developing a Koala Management Plan. What an utter and total waste of time and money! The only plan that Council should be revising is the Draft Fraser Coast Planning Scheme. This scheme will take precedence over every and any other plan and it will outline which land can and cannot be developed.

It seems Government is happy to spend lots and lots of money “planning”. We are all invited to participate and mostly the outcomes are simple common sense. BUT how many of these plans are costed and include actual mechanisms to enable the actual achievement of he aims described within?

I have never ever in all my years involved with Council witnessed a ‘plan’ that actually achieved what it set out to do. After all the recent land clearing at Tinana, which is sensitive koala habitat, was approved for development under the current Maryborough Planning Scheme! Please don’t throw good money down the drain. Just fix the actual Planning Scheme to properly protect environmentally important lands.

2 Responses to “Koalas versus Development”

Politicians at all levels are besotted with “plans”. “reports”, “study trips” ,
‘enquiries”, and anything else that only wastes a million or two dollars instead of spending quite a few million and actually DOING something.

Procrastination is a way of life and gets them to the next election where the important business of getting re-elected takes over.
The only way out of this is for us electors to vote for any independent that stands, ignore any ‘party’ nonsense, and as a last resort just write on the ballot slip our opinion of all those offering themselves to accept obscene salaries and benefits and DO absolutely nothing. We pay them – they do very little for us.

Sue,
Can only agree. There are possibly less koalas now than around 1980’s when I lived on Teddington Road. The koala requires a large habitat and does not manage threats from feral and domestic dogs and feral cats. Motorcars are equally bad. All are killers and councils can waste as much money as they like but as years go by the koala will be annilated in these close urban areas. By all means encourage small colonies to reside in heavily protected small sanctuaries so children and tourists may see them. But for serious conservation there are hundreds of thousands of acres of so called national parks just west of Brooweena and right through to the Brisbane Valley south or Mt Perry to the north . All natural forested habitat which should contain thousands of koala. Probably if the dingo were removed from Fraser Island this could provide a natural breeding habitat for koala.
Those of us from the bush know the really threatened native mammals are the small ground dwellers which have all but disappeared. But hey they are not cuddly photogenic creatures people love to hug for a snapshot.So FCRC please focus on the real needs of our small natives not trying to tie up useless pieces of bush around cities.
Police Pasddock reserve is a sizeable area but unless fence with vermin proof fences and with fertilised areas of fodder trees do not work. Various people including John Warmsley at Warrawong near Adelaide have done the science and built the vermin proof fencing and it works. He also bred the first platypus In captivity.